Forest, looking out upon the woods of Newlyns and Chartley. Here lived Alice Lisle, and here are shown the hiding-places where, after the battle of Sedgemoor, she concealed Hicks and Nelthorpe. The house is sadly out of repair; the oak floors, and part of the fine old staircase, and the wainscoting of many of the rooms have been taken away; the old tapestry is destroyed and the iron gates rusted and broken. Still the private chapel remains, with its panelling and carved string-course of heads, and its "Ecce Homo" over the place where the altar once stood.[1]
The story of Alice Lisle needs no telling. She was found guilty of high treason not by the jury, but by the judge,—the infamous Jeffreys,—and was condemned, for an act of Christian kindness, to worse than a felon's death.
In Ellingham churchyard, close to the south porch, stands a plain brick tomb under which she, and her daughter Anne Hartell, lie, with the simple words, "Alicia Lisle dyed the second of September, 1685;" and round the tomb, weaving its ever green chaplet, grows the little rue-leaved spleenwort.
But a nobler monument has been raised to her in our Houses of Parliament. In the Commons' corridor she stands, bent with age, resting on her staff, with a gentle placidness shining in her face, unmoved by any fears for the future, but caring only to do what her heart feels to be right; whilst on the opposite wall, painted by the same hand, lives another of those Englishwomen of whom we may be proud,—Jane Lane, who, in her loyalty, would as willingly have sacrificed herself for one of the most ungrateful of princes, as Alice Lisle for the poor Puritans.
- ↑ In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1828, vol. 98, part, ii., p. 17, is a sketch of the house, taken fifty years ago, which, with the exception of some parts now pulled down, much resembles its present condition.
